For almost eight years the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) have maintained that officers having sexual relationships undercover could never be an operational tactic.

The apologies they have so-far extended to myself and at least eight other women who were deceived into intimate relationships with undercover operatives, state that such relationships “would never have been authorised” and were the result of “failures of supervision and management”.

The subtext is: these were rogue officers misbehaving, and their commanding officers did not know.

Yet now, as part of my Human Rights Claim in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) they have admitted that:

“MK’s sexual relationship with the Claimant was carried out with the acquiescence of his cover officers and line manager.”

That means Mark Kennedy’s principal cover officer, his line manager, and perhaps five or six other men who undertook managing the operation at different times.

I still do not know their names; I cannot imagine their faces; but I now know that they discussed, considered, assessed and evaluated my sexual abuse, as part of ‘Operation Pegasus’, and decided it was a good idea.

I do not doubt that there were more members of this club. These are just the men who will be implicated if I ever get to see my files. I am sick to my stomach when I think about it.

The MPS have spent eight years smugly lying, refusing to give any woman disclosure about her case, and arrogantly assuming that the truth will never come to light.

This admission from the MPS, alongside the heavily redacted Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) Trade Craft Manual released by the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) this week, shows that managers were deeply complicit in the grossest wrongdoings of these undercover units.

It amounts to a cold-blooded conspiracy, more chilling even than the acts themselves, and for the UCPI to offer anonymity to any manager of the SDS or National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), who should be held accountable for these operations, is an insult to the women they conspired to abuse.